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A Man of Letters - Sneak Peek

Issue #13 features an interview with Peter Darvill-Evans, covering his Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and work at Virgin on the Doctor Who original fiction ranges.

You introduced willpower as a new stat in Beneath Nightmare Castle. What made you tinker with the rules in your first book?

I think – and I must stress just how long ago all this occurred, and that my memory is notoriously poor in the absence of documentary evidence – that I had felt from the inception of Fighting Fantasy books that the standard stats made for a rather simplistic game experience. In each of my books I tried to stretch the original Fighting Fantasy concept, but in each case in a way that I hoped was appropriate to the subject matter. In a tale of Lovecraftian horror, willpower seemed like the necessary additional ingredient.